


Forged

by Aisalynn



Category: Merlin (TV)
Genre: Gen, Season/Series 03
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-09-14
Updated: 2020-09-14
Packaged: 2021-03-07 00:41:23
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 814
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26458105
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Aisalynn/pseuds/Aisalynn
Summary: In the year following Morgana’s kidnapping, Gwen goes back to the forge.
Relationships: Gwen & Morgana (Merlin)
Comments: 4
Kudos: 13





	Forged

She is a blacksmith’s daughter.  
  
She grew up near the heat, kept a safe distance away by her father’s command, the smell of hot metal thick in the back of her throat as she watched him work. The steady movement of his arms as he swung the hammer and the flickering red light of coals revealed and then hidden by the broad of his shoulders were images that meant safety, home.  
  
She was never cold during the winter, and the clank of metal against metal was her lullaby.  
  
When she was old enough to work, her father’s connections to the castle armory helped her get a position in the castle, and suddenly she was thrown into the unfamiliar. The castle halls were cold and drafty and she felt too unsure, too clumsy in her new livery, finer than anything she’d worn before: free of coal smears and holes burned through the sleeves when she disobeyed her father and got too close to the fire to avoid the sparks. But she learned. She learned how to curtsey properly and how to balance a tray and a pitcher while walking up the long, spiral stone staircases of Camelot, how to smile politely but not meet the eyes of those above her and eventually, how to not mind the cold.  
  
She learned to love it there.  
  
The Lady Morgana was unlike anyone she had ever known before. She glittered more than the fanciest blade her father made, with her fine dresses and finer jewelry, but her smile was quick, voice warm. Despite their differences in rank she was never treated less than a friend and soon it became one of the two constants in her life: the sound of her father’s hammer, and her Lady’s hand in hers.  
  
Both were stripped from her.  
  
In the year following Morgana’s kidnapping, Gwen goes back to the forge. The heat of it is familiar, but scalding. This time she has no father to make her back away from the coals, no Lady to call her back into the stone walls of the castle. Her hands burn and blister as she works, but the burn in the muscles of her shoulders is a good burn, a clean and earned pain, and the weight of the hammer in her palm becomes familiar, the blisters become calluses.  
  
She relearns this life, setting aside the light airy apron of the castle for the beaten leather one her father wore, forgets for a while what it’s like to serve and learns again what it is to create. There is power in the hot bubbling metal, the unrestrained potential to become, to be anything, and there is power in the shaping of it.  
  
She lives that year in the red light of the forge, lives it one chain mail link, one sword blade, at a time and she almost loses track of the days, would have lost the change of the weather in the constant heat from the fire if Arthur hadn’t come to tell her that Morgana was back.  
  
He stands in the doorway clad in mail and armor her hands have formed and there’s grease under her fingernails, coal smears on her clothes and there is sweat collecting at the nape of her neck and slipping down to stain the collar of her father’s shirt, but she doesn’t duck her head or blush. She hasn’t, not since the first few times he’s come here, seen her like this, dressed as a man and working like one. She doesn’t try to avoid his eyes even though he only meets hers when he asks, voice solemn, for her to return to the castle to attend Morgana.  
  
So she puts down the hammer, and dons the clothes of a Lady’s Maid, and even though her calluses snag on the thin fabric of her dress and she feels, once again, too clumsy and too unsure as she shivers in the cool of the castle, she goes happily, because Morgana is warm and her smile is quick and sincere, and like the forge, like her father’s hammer, Morgana was a constant in her life and one she is eager to depend on again.  
  
But Morgana is different. She smiles and she cries and talks of bandits and fear, and though Morgana reaches for her hand when she sees her just like before, there is something off about her, like a sword just slightly off balance. Before Morgana was warm with energy and motion, bubbling with potential, and now she is still and cool.  
  
She tries to ignore the calluses that should not be on her Lady’s hands, the sharp edge of her smile, and tries to stifle her unease, but it is hard.  
  
Gwen is a blacksmith’s daughter, and more than anything else she has learned in her life, she knows how to tell when a weapon is finished.


End file.
